Denny Crum was sitting with the Louisville fans behind the team’s bench in the Georgia Dome Saturday night. As the network cameras picked up the white-haired 76-year-old Hall of Famer, cheering on the players coached by his successor after his retirement in 2001, a thought likely ran through millions of viewers’ minds:

Has it been that long?

Michigan forward Mitch McGary has helped lead the Wolverines to the championship game for the first time in 20 years. Michigan faces Louisville for the title on Monday. (AP Photo)

It’s been that long.

Louisville’s last appearance in the NCAA championship game—before Monday’s final against Michigan—was 27 years ago, 1986, when Crum’s Cardinals won their second title, 72-69 over Duke. The Most Outstanding Player had a nickname for the ages, “Never Nervous” Pervis Ellison.

The Cardinals won it in Dallas’s Reunion Arena, and, as Crum told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month, “It’s not even an arena anymore.’’ (It was torn down in 2009.)

Everybody who was thrown off-balance by the fact that the final act of the Fab Five was 20 years ago this week, has to be really staggering from those thoughts.

This also should give the college basketball world a good shake: The last time Rick Pitino—reportedly about to join Crum in the Hall of Fame on Monday— played in the national championship game was almost as long ago as Michigan’s last appearance. A clue came from the next person the CBS cameras focused on after Crum, sitting a few seats down the row … Lute Olson.

His 1997 Arizona team stopped Pitino’s Kentucky Wildcats from winning back-to-back titles, 84-79 in the last overtime title game. Olson is 78 and retired five years ago.

Yes, it seems improbable that a program this historic and a coach this accomplished have had droughts like those. Two legendary coaches in 43 years, waves of all-Americans and near-annual trips to the tournament, yet in the case of the school and its coach, the ultimate glory they’re on the verge of restoring has been a long time coming.

Louisville, of course, had gotten to two Final Fours under Pitino before, including last year when it lost the intrastate rivalry to Kentucky. In neither previous trip were the Cardinals the favorites, either going into the tournament or entering the Final Four. This time, as in his Kentucky days, he began the dance as the No. 1 overall seed, and Saturday began with his team the prohibitive favorite to take the title.

If he pulls it off— and prepare to hear a lot about this in the next 48 hours—Pitino will make history: the first coach to lead two different schools to national championships. He’ll also be the 14th coach to win at least two titles overall.

His Michigan counterpart, John Beilein, won’t bring anywhere close to that same hardware into Monday’s game, this being his first Final Four trip. The same goes for his program, which holds a unique place in the lore of the game. Which team does America remember most, for better or worse and in all sorts of ways as the decades have passed by … the Fab Five group that reached two straight championship games in 1992 and ’93, or the one that won it all in 1989?

That’s not even an easy question to answer at Michigan, even though in the eyes of the official NCAA and the university, the more recent teams never existed. The title-game banners are infamously in storage, not on display. That issue alone, though, generates far greater, and far more heated, discussion than Steve Fisher’s championship team—even though that one was born in more than enough controversy to sustain its legacy.

That was the year Fisher was rushed into the head-coaching job on the eve of the tournament after then-athletic director Bo Schembechler ran off head coach Bill Frieder for accepting another coaching job. Again, this was just four years before Chris Webber and Co. arrived on campus as celebrated freshmen. But who remembers Bo demanding that “a Michigan man” coach the team, as much as they remember “Time Out”?

Add this to the “I’m so old” file: Fisher has now coached six years longer at San Diego State, 14 in all, than he did at Michigan, eight years plus that six-game tournament run at the beginning.

Michigan did have to stage a long, slow, painful resurrection after NCAA violations took down the Fab Five legacy, Fisher and everybody in the mid-1990s. It has no record of tournament success to lean on since the turn of the century, the way Pitino does individually and Louisville has collectively.

The Wolverines’ wait, technically, hasn’t been as long as Louisville’s, and just slightly longer than Pitino’s. But in terms of the pain of waiting, they can hold their own. By tip-off Monday, the Michigan faithful might not be as white-haired as Denny Crum, but it might be close.